Wednesday, September 12, 2012

The Party

If you were around when Chris and I got married you might notice that this birthday invitation looks slightly familiar. Yep, we used the exact template we designed for our Save the Date. We already had it and it was easy to drop in new pictures and new text. I had found several birthday invitations I liked on Etsy, but of course they were super expensive. And there was nothing I really like on Shutterfly or Snapfish that I liked that was in our budget. For the record, if you ever have printing needs, Overnight Prints is fabulous and very affordable. We designed the postcard (also cheaper postage) using Pages on the Mac and then uploaded the design to Overnight Prints. They cost us .17 cents a piece for custom invitations. Now, when we did our Save the Dates, we ordered enough to qualify us for free shipping, but of course we didn't need as many birthday invitations so we did have to pay shipping (which I hate) but they still ended up being less expensive than any other option we had looked at. We have used Overnight Prints for a couple RUF mailers and events and have always been very impressed with the quality. We will probably use them for Christmas cards this year.

I didn't really have a party theme, just more of an informal BBQ to get friends together to celebrate. Honestly, it was more of an excuse for us to see and hangout with some of our friends and neighbors we hadn't seen in awhile.

I decorated mostly with tissue paper balls (not super original these days but cute, cheap, and easy) and a pink birthday banner that I made. I had goals of making some paper or fabric triangle banners as well, but what can I say- it didn't happen. I had made the tissue paper balls and banner about 3 weeks early and then things seemed to get busy so not much else got done. There were a ton of tissue paper balls though! When we went to put them all up the night before the party I was quite surprised at how many I had made.

I had also printed out all of Phoebe's monthly diaper pictures and hung them around the french doors out to the Florida Room. It was fun to see how much she has changed over the past year!

So I majorly failed taking pictures at and before the party. I'm sad I never got a picture of the food table and decorations. They were cute. We had a fruit and veggie platter, chips and bean dip. And then we served the burgers and hot dogs before cake.

It was a fun afternoon! Thanks to everyone who came out to celebrate with us. We probably had about 25 people here (which is about at max capacity for our little townhouse) plus several kids running around.